Sunday, July 20, 2008

Relay Server Attack Tactic Dupes Auto-Reporting

Sysadmins have begun noticing a coordinated attack on servers with open SSH ports that tries to stay under the radar by only attempting to guess a password three times from any compromised machine. Instead of mounting an attack form a single compromised host, hackers have worked out a means to relay a brute force attack between multiple assault machines.

IT consultant and developer Nazar Aziz picked up on the attack, which started around the beginning of July, when he noticed a pattern of assaults on a small bank of dedicated Linux servers he manages.